rather Utopian local communities, and sometimes to provide a path
of upward mobility and assimilation.
Lars Furuland observes that current literary trends promote the
serious study of Swedish-American fiction. He sees a general shift
away from elite works by outstanding authors and towards more
popular literature in historical and social context.
Get this little book. It's a good one.
J. R. CHRISTIANSON
L u t h e r College
Olavi Koivukangas, SEA, GOLD AND SUGARCANE. ATTRAC­TION
VERSUS DISTANCE. FINNS IN AUSTRALIA 1851-1947.
Migration Studies C8. Institute of Migration, Turku, Finland, 1986.
402 pp.
Only in recent years have scholars turned their attention to
Scandinavian emigrants in the far Pacific. Ulf Beijbom followed up
his books on North American immigration with the story of
Swedes in Australia (Australienfararna, 1983). Since 1968 Olavi
Koivukangas, furthermore, has gathered information on Finnish
immigrants in Australia. In addition to compiling data from Finnish
shipping lists and consular files, Koivukangas spent three years at
the National University in Canberra, where he studied Australian
government records and the accounts of Finnish immigrants
themselves. The result is S e a , G o l d a n d S u g a r c a n e , the first
book-length study in English of a little-known ethnic group Down
Under.
Koivukangas divides his study into three general sections. The
first deals with the author's research methods as well as push-pull
factors that led individual Finns to Australia. As a rule, the
emigrants during the last half of the nineteenth century were
sailors, many Swedish-speaking, from the west coast of Finland
(where serving on foreign vessels and Finnish sailing ships was a
long-standing practice) or manual laborers seeking better salaries
abroad. Koivukangas writes (p. 53): "The typical pattern is one of
pioneers, often seamen and footloose adventurers, who lead the
way and attract fellow countrymen in their footsteps." Young,
unmarried men constituted as much as 90% of this immigrant
group. Koivukangas characterizes many of these men's lives in
88
Australia as a wandering seafarer's existence, perpetuated on land
as a continual walkabout from one temporary laboring position to
another and punctuated by weekends spent in country bars. These
immigrants found employment in coastal shipping, in the gold
fields of Victoria and Western Australia, or among hired laborers in
the cane fields of northern Queensland: thus the sea, gold, and
sugarcane of Koivukangas' title.
Group emigration gained importance only at the turn of the
present century, when the Matti Kurikka Utopian farm project was
attempted in southern Queensland, and later when other rural
settlements were started in New South Wales and northern
Queensland. Although Koivukangas points out that these settlers
were not forced out of Finland for political reasons, several of the
groups (or members of them) had political motivations among their
reasons for emigrating. Kurikka and his followers were socialists,
while certain individuals in the New South Wales settlements left
Finland in the 1890s to avoid disagreeable aspects of Russification,
e.g., military service. In addition, twelve Finnish "Whites" who
had fought in the German-trained Jäger battalion may have chosen
to emigrate to Australia rather than North America after the Finnish
Civil War of 1918, in order to avoid confrontation with the large
numbers of Finnish leftists in Canada and the United States.
The concluding sections of Sea, Gold and Sugarcane deal with the
Finns' adaptation and efforts to maintain their culture. No more
than 6,000 Finns came to Australia during the ninety-six years
covered in this study. Nevertheless the Finns remained a close-knit
group, especially in Queensland. Chain and pipeline migration,
coupled with the Finnish emigrants' relative lack of proficiency in
English, contributed to the preservation of Finnishness. As in
North America, Finns established meeting halls, athletic clubs,
reading rooms, and publications, among which was S u o m i , the first
Finnish-language newspaper in the southern hemisphere.
Sea, Gold and Sugarcane is an exhaustively researched work, one
made especially thorough by the author's cross-referencing of
sources in both Finland and Australia. It also contains a helpful
bibliography; readers wishing to make full use of it must know
English, Finnish, and Swedish. The book is well-illustrated with
photographs, charts, and maps and systematically traces Finnish
settlements in each of the Australian states.
Koivukangas' work is not just to be viewed, however, as
demographic chartwork, of the type which often comes from
89
Scandinavian emigrant historians. It also contains strong elements
of human interest, a fact conceivably influenced by Beijbom who
was the book's external referee. Koivukangas accurately describes
his book as falling within the area of social history. Since many of
the immigrants arrived in Australia after 1900, the author was able
to interview them, their friends, or their descendants. He has also
made use of journals, diaries, and immigrant letters.
The Finns in Australia were few enough (no mass emigration
developed) that the author is able to step beyond the tracing of
settlement patterns and describe personality traits as well. Happily,
Koivukangas has a ready eye for the more colorful emigrants. These
include the family-oriented cane cutters of the tropical north who
fought off poisonous reptiles on their farmsteads; Western Austra­lia's
Antti Ilmari Könönen ("Kangaroo Frank"), the only known
Finnish professional kangaroo hunter; and Emma Seppänen, a
Brisbane boardinghouse keeper known to local immigrants as
"Mother Finland." Indeed the reader often wishes for even more
information on such emigrants than is given in these pages. Surely
Koivukangas' major task lay in striking a happy balance between
the statistical and the social aspects of his topic, the latter of which
suggest several novels or short stories to the imaginative reader.
The strongest point of Koivukangas' work is the wealth of
historical and theoretical background material which supports the
social aspects. Emigration specialists and generalists alike may
benefit from his introductory discussions of Australian history. In
addition, he stresses the similarities and differences between
Finnish immigration to North America and that to Australia. In his
final chapter, Koivukangas explains Finnish migration within the
framework of various theories of emigration. Distance, he empha­sizes,
has had the greatest single impact on Finnish migration to
Australia. In this respect, readers should pay special attention to
Koivukangas' application of E. G. Ravenstein's observation that the
greater the distances involved in resettling, the more likely it is that
men will outnumber women.
One may have a few regrets about this work. Despite Koivukan­gas'
careful research, many of the earlier emigrants' identifies will
sadly never be known to us, since Finns were often listed as
Russians by immigration authorities before the 1920s. Other Finns
claimed Swedish nationality during the World Wars. Koivukangas
had, of course, no way to acquire information about these people.
90
However, his later brief but well-documented discussion of Finnish
nationals who were held as enemy aliens in Australian internment
camps during World War II, merits more detail. At any rate, it is
surely a topic for further research and a separate paper. Finally, the
text contains a good deal of repetition that could have been
avoided: the reader is reminded too often, for example, that few
Finnish women came to Australia, that women who married British
subjects automatically acquired British nationality, and that many
Finnish men in Australia were former, often deserted, seamen.
Initially one might wonder how Koivukangas could have written
so much about so few immigrants, but readers will find this book
instructive in many different areas. We may look forward to the
author's promised second volume dealing with the period 1947 to
the present.
ROGER MCKNIGHT
Gustavus Adolphus College
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Alf Åberg's welcome history of Sweden's 17th-century colony on
the Delaware, Folket i Nya Sverige (reviewed in this number of the
Q u a r t e r l y ) is now available in English under the title, T h e People of
N e w Sweden (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1988, 196 pp., illustr.,
hardcover). It is distributed in the U.S. by: The Middle Atlantic
Press, Inc., P. O. Box 945, Wilmington, DE 19899.
Robert A. Turnquist has written H e a r t of the H i l l : A Collection of
Vignettes about Bethphage M i s s i o n (Omaha: Colonial Press, 1987, 146
pp., softcover) on the history of the Swedish Lutheran home for the
developmentally disabled in Axtell, Nebraska, established in 1913,
and its remarkable founder, Pastor K. G. William Dahl. Contact:
Bethphage Mission, P. O. Box 67, Axtell, NE 68924.
91

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All rights held by the Swedish-American Historical Society. No part of this publication, except in the case of brief quotations, may be reproduced in any manner without the written permission of the editor and, where appropriate, the original author(s). For more information, please email the Society at info@swedishamericanhist.org

rather Utopian local communities, and sometimes to provide a path
of upward mobility and assimilation.
Lars Furuland observes that current literary trends promote the
serious study of Swedish-American fiction. He sees a general shift
away from elite works by outstanding authors and towards more
popular literature in historical and social context.
Get this little book. It's a good one.
J. R. CHRISTIANSON
L u t h e r College
Olavi Koivukangas, SEA, GOLD AND SUGARCANE. ATTRAC­TION
VERSUS DISTANCE. FINNS IN AUSTRALIA 1851-1947.
Migration Studies C8. Institute of Migration, Turku, Finland, 1986.
402 pp.
Only in recent years have scholars turned their attention to
Scandinavian emigrants in the far Pacific. Ulf Beijbom followed up
his books on North American immigration with the story of
Swedes in Australia (Australienfararna, 1983). Since 1968 Olavi
Koivukangas, furthermore, has gathered information on Finnish
immigrants in Australia. In addition to compiling data from Finnish
shipping lists and consular files, Koivukangas spent three years at
the National University in Canberra, where he studied Australian
government records and the accounts of Finnish immigrants
themselves. The result is S e a , G o l d a n d S u g a r c a n e , the first
book-length study in English of a little-known ethnic group Down
Under.
Koivukangas divides his study into three general sections. The
first deals with the author's research methods as well as push-pull
factors that led individual Finns to Australia. As a rule, the
emigrants during the last half of the nineteenth century were
sailors, many Swedish-speaking, from the west coast of Finland
(where serving on foreign vessels and Finnish sailing ships was a
long-standing practice) or manual laborers seeking better salaries
abroad. Koivukangas writes (p. 53): "The typical pattern is one of
pioneers, often seamen and footloose adventurers, who lead the
way and attract fellow countrymen in their footsteps." Young,
unmarried men constituted as much as 90% of this immigrant
group. Koivukangas characterizes many of these men's lives in
88
Australia as a wandering seafarer's existence, perpetuated on land
as a continual walkabout from one temporary laboring position to
another and punctuated by weekends spent in country bars. These
immigrants found employment in coastal shipping, in the gold
fields of Victoria and Western Australia, or among hired laborers in
the cane fields of northern Queensland: thus the sea, gold, and
sugarcane of Koivukangas' title.
Group emigration gained importance only at the turn of the
present century, when the Matti Kurikka Utopian farm project was
attempted in southern Queensland, and later when other rural
settlements were started in New South Wales and northern
Queensland. Although Koivukangas points out that these settlers
were not forced out of Finland for political reasons, several of the
groups (or members of them) had political motivations among their
reasons for emigrating. Kurikka and his followers were socialists,
while certain individuals in the New South Wales settlements left
Finland in the 1890s to avoid disagreeable aspects of Russification,
e.g., military service. In addition, twelve Finnish "Whites" who
had fought in the German-trained Jäger battalion may have chosen
to emigrate to Australia rather than North America after the Finnish
Civil War of 1918, in order to avoid confrontation with the large
numbers of Finnish leftists in Canada and the United States.
The concluding sections of Sea, Gold and Sugarcane deal with the
Finns' adaptation and efforts to maintain their culture. No more
than 6,000 Finns came to Australia during the ninety-six years
covered in this study. Nevertheless the Finns remained a close-knit
group, especially in Queensland. Chain and pipeline migration,
coupled with the Finnish emigrants' relative lack of proficiency in
English, contributed to the preservation of Finnishness. As in
North America, Finns established meeting halls, athletic clubs,
reading rooms, and publications, among which was S u o m i , the first
Finnish-language newspaper in the southern hemisphere.
Sea, Gold and Sugarcane is an exhaustively researched work, one
made especially thorough by the author's cross-referencing of
sources in both Finland and Australia. It also contains a helpful
bibliography; readers wishing to make full use of it must know
English, Finnish, and Swedish. The book is well-illustrated with
photographs, charts, and maps and systematically traces Finnish
settlements in each of the Australian states.
Koivukangas' work is not just to be viewed, however, as
demographic chartwork, of the type which often comes from
89
Scandinavian emigrant historians. It also contains strong elements
of human interest, a fact conceivably influenced by Beijbom who
was the book's external referee. Koivukangas accurately describes
his book as falling within the area of social history. Since many of
the immigrants arrived in Australia after 1900, the author was able
to interview them, their friends, or their descendants. He has also
made use of journals, diaries, and immigrant letters.
The Finns in Australia were few enough (no mass emigration
developed) that the author is able to step beyond the tracing of
settlement patterns and describe personality traits as well. Happily,
Koivukangas has a ready eye for the more colorful emigrants. These
include the family-oriented cane cutters of the tropical north who
fought off poisonous reptiles on their farmsteads; Western Austra­lia's
Antti Ilmari Könönen ("Kangaroo Frank"), the only known
Finnish professional kangaroo hunter; and Emma Seppänen, a
Brisbane boardinghouse keeper known to local immigrants as
"Mother Finland." Indeed the reader often wishes for even more
information on such emigrants than is given in these pages. Surely
Koivukangas' major task lay in striking a happy balance between
the statistical and the social aspects of his topic, the latter of which
suggest several novels or short stories to the imaginative reader.
The strongest point of Koivukangas' work is the wealth of
historical and theoretical background material which supports the
social aspects. Emigration specialists and generalists alike may
benefit from his introductory discussions of Australian history. In
addition, he stresses the similarities and differences between
Finnish immigration to North America and that to Australia. In his
final chapter, Koivukangas explains Finnish migration within the
framework of various theories of emigration. Distance, he empha­sizes,
has had the greatest single impact on Finnish migration to
Australia. In this respect, readers should pay special attention to
Koivukangas' application of E. G. Ravenstein's observation that the
greater the distances involved in resettling, the more likely it is that
men will outnumber women.
One may have a few regrets about this work. Despite Koivukan­gas'
careful research, many of the earlier emigrants' identifies will
sadly never be known to us, since Finns were often listed as
Russians by immigration authorities before the 1920s. Other Finns
claimed Swedish nationality during the World Wars. Koivukangas
had, of course, no way to acquire information about these people.
90
However, his later brief but well-documented discussion of Finnish
nationals who were held as enemy aliens in Australian internment
camps during World War II, merits more detail. At any rate, it is
surely a topic for further research and a separate paper. Finally, the
text contains a good deal of repetition that could have been
avoided: the reader is reminded too often, for example, that few
Finnish women came to Australia, that women who married British
subjects automatically acquired British nationality, and that many
Finnish men in Australia were former, often deserted, seamen.
Initially one might wonder how Koivukangas could have written
so much about so few immigrants, but readers will find this book
instructive in many different areas. We may look forward to the
author's promised second volume dealing with the period 1947 to
the present.
ROGER MCKNIGHT
Gustavus Adolphus College
OTHER PUBLICATIONS
Alf Åberg's welcome history of Sweden's 17th-century colony on
the Delaware, Folket i Nya Sverige (reviewed in this number of the
Q u a r t e r l y ) is now available in English under the title, T h e People of
N e w Sweden (Stockholm: Natur och Kultur, 1988, 196 pp., illustr.,
hardcover). It is distributed in the U.S. by: The Middle Atlantic
Press, Inc., P. O. Box 945, Wilmington, DE 19899.
Robert A. Turnquist has written H e a r t of the H i l l : A Collection of
Vignettes about Bethphage M i s s i o n (Omaha: Colonial Press, 1987, 146
pp., softcover) on the history of the Swedish Lutheran home for the
developmentally disabled in Axtell, Nebraska, established in 1913,
and its remarkable founder, Pastor K. G. William Dahl. Contact:
Bethphage Mission, P. O. Box 67, Axtell, NE 68924.
91